Victim Six (4 page)

March 30, evening
South Colby

Steven and Kendall Stark lived in a gray and white 1920s bungalow above Yukon Harbor in South Colby, a few miles outside Port Orchard on the way to the Southworth ferry landing. Since her childhood in nearby Harper, Kendall had admired the house and how it sat on an incline backed with an impressive grove of moss-covered maples and silver-barked alders. It didn’t take any convincing to get her husband to share her dream. In fact, when the house went on the market five years into their marriage, it was Steven who surprised his wife with an open-house flyer and a promise “to make this happen for you, babe.”

A stone-edged walkway led from the street to wide front steps and a covered porch that seldom saw a summer evening without the presence of someone kicking back with a beer or a soda, watching the bay turn from blue to ink. It was a home that felt instantly comfortable, like those favorite brown leather slippers some dads wear for decades until they split at the toes. The place had been remodeled in the 1980s by a couple who likely didn’t realize the benefits of restoring a vintage home to its original charm. Wall-to-wall carpeting was easy enough to remove to expose original fir floors, but layers of mauve and kelly green paint over the rest of the woodwork was a daunting challenge. It took Steven and Kendall almost a year to scrape, sand, and re-stain the doors and trim. In the end, the house was any young couple’s vision of the perfect first home—enough room for children, a lawn that rolled from the front door to the main road, and a view of Blake Island and the harbor interrupted only by a few power lines and the frontage road.

Steven destroyed the kitchen making his specialty for dinner, lasagna layered with roasted red bell peppers and sweet apple sausage. Between sales calls, he picked up a loaf of French bread at the Albertsons on Mile Hill Road and slathered it with garlic butter—Cody’s favorite.

By the time Kendall made it home, the house smelled like an Italian restaurant. And a pretty good one at that. If she was stuck with the dishes (“You cook, I’ll clean”), the deal seemed fair enough.

“Where’s the wine?” she asked, setting down her things and taking off her coat.

“Uncorked and breathing.” He went for the glasses, the last pair that matched from their wedding stemware. “Cody’s in his room.”

The words were familiar. Cody’s way of coping was isolation.

“We have to talk,” she said.

“I know.”

Kendall nuzzled the back of her husband’s neck as he poured the wine, a dark, almost syrupy cabernet that infused the glasses with the glow of a glass full of rubies.

“We can’t pretend he’s going to be okay,” she said.

“I stopped pretending a long time ago.”

She took a sip of her wine and thought carefully. “You know what I mean. We’re going to have to reconsider Inverness or something like it. He’s got his whole life ahead of him, and we have to find out what is best for him.”

Steven’s eyes narrowed on his wife. The year before she’d cut her medium-length blond bob to a shorter cut. Sometimes when she hastily ran the hair product through her hair in the mornings, she ended up with an almost spiky do. It suited her. It made her deep blue eyes more pronounced and more of a mirror of what she was thinking.

“He’s not living there, and you know that,” he said.

Kendall set her wineglass on the still-mauve laminate kitchen countertop.

“We have to do what’s best,” she said. “I just wish I knew what that was.” A tear threatened to roll down her cheek, and she wiped it away.

There would be plenty of time for crying later. Her husband was more certain about the future, taking a kind of optimistic approach that she’d abandoned. Partly it was because of her job, but also because her dreams for her little boy had faded over time too.

“I’m going to check on Cody,” she said, heading down the hallway to Cody’s room with its captain’s bed, orca wallpaper, and array of toys that would be the envy of any child his age, or maybe a little younger. He was playing with a puzzle that he liked to put together, wrong side up.

Kendall let her mind wander back to the first moment she had any inkling that something was different about Cody. She never allowed the words
wrong
and
aberrant
to find their way into her thoughts. Even the euphemisms like
special
or
challenged
were banished from her vocabulary when she replayed any of the instances in which her beautiful boy seemed, well,
different
. He was three months old, a bundle of pink skin and downy blond hair swathed in a pale blue blanket. The cat had jumped up on the coffee table and knocked over a tippy vase of daffodils, sending it crashing to the floor. The noise startled Kendall but not Cody. Not at all. He just stayed still, a slight smile on his rosebud lips, his blue eyes fixed on the table lamp. Kendall worried that Cody’s lack of response could indicate hearing impairment. She snapped her fingers in his face.

Again nothing. A trip to the pediatrician the next day confirmed that his hearing was fine.

It was more serious than mere deafness.

“It’s too early to say, of course,” the doctor said, “but this kind of intent, uninterruptible gaze can sometimes foretell autism.”

Kendall felt the air rush from her lungs.

“Are you sure?”

“Look, Kendall, I’ve been a pediatrician long enough to see the early warnings. Testing will need to be done, certainly. But the truest indicator will be time itself.”

“But he might outgrow it, right?”

“Some do. Most don’t. And, dear, remember, there are varying degrees of severity. Maybe we’ll be lucky here.”

The word luck always stuck in her mind. Kendall Stark was not a believer in the concept. She felt that all people, good and bad, had a role in the outcome of their lives. As a cop and as a mother, she had to think so. Otherwise, the world was too random of a place for order.

Order was what she craved.

She stood quietly watching Cody as he worked the puzzle on the braided rug that covered the old fir floor of his bedroom. He never turned the pieces to make them fit. He just knew where they snapped into place. She wondered what other strange talents her special son might have. Autism was heartbreaking beyond comprehension, she knew, but there was a bit of magic in the disorder too. Some children could work numbers in a way that an MIT graduate couldn’t; some were artists whose inspiration was otherworldly.

And yet, she had prayed for a miracle since the day of his diagnosis. That there would be something that would bring her son back to what she and Steven had dreamed their child would be. Kendall put on a brave face with Steven, because she had to. And no matter the future—a gifted child or one who stared forever into space—Cody Stark would always be her beautiful boy.

Later that evening, after Cody was asleep, the story of the missing brush picker and the harsh reality of the teacher’s conference no longer fighting for her awareness, Kendall and Steven took a moment just to hold each other. It was not a mechanical embrace or a kind of attempt by one to guide the other to the bedroom. It was something deeper, the kind of gesture that confirmed that no matter what they faced, they would always face it together. The spring evening was warm enough for a sweater, and the couple went outside on the porch with the last of their cabernet. Miles away, across Puget Sound, they could see a portion of the Seattle skyline, including the iconic spire of the Space Needle.

Lights flickered on a few boats that moved silently through the waters. Some carried freight destined for the ports of Seattle or Tacoma. Some held partiers who’d had too much to drink, fisherman who were disappointed by what they hadn’t caught, marine biologists who wondered where a missing member of a local pod of orcas had gone.

One carried a dark specter of depravity that no other human being could imagine.

He tucked a Camel straight between his lips and looked out over the water as a trio of harbor seals bobbed in the wake of another boat, now all but a pinprick on the horizon. She’d been the perfect victim. Her terror was a rush, a vibration that stimulated. She was, in fact, his Magic Fingers. She was what he considered a lucky catch, a girl just begging to be a victim because of her trusting nature. He preferred those who fought a little harder or wore their skepticism like a shield.

His cigarette dangling, his fingertip rubbed across the silver Crossfire lighter that felt so good in his palm as he let the cool evening air pour over his handsome face.

She was looking at the Seattle skyline.

He imagined a conversation:

Everything all right, baby?
she asked, her eyes a mix of worry and fear.

No problems I can’t fix
, he answered into the wind.

Need any help?

He shook his head and went to cut the boat’s engine.

No. You’ve done enough.

Kendall crawled under the covers and nuzzled her husband. Steven was asleep, snoring softly in the manner she found more charming than irritating. The regular rhythm of his slumber was something that she could always count on, and it comforted her just then. She found herself thinking of how her life might have gone if they’d stayed apart. She remembered how lost she’d been that lonely, dark time years ago.

His voice on the phone still reverberated in her memory.

“Kendall, I don’t really know what’s going on.”

“I don’t, either.”

“But you do,” Steven said.

“I need more time to sort out things.”

“I’m begging you,” he said, his voice a quiet rasp. “Please.”

March 31, 8 a.m.
Port Orchard

Tulio Pena had left two voice messages on Kendall’s office phone. Both were colored by the anguish of a man frightened to death. In the background, Kendall could hear the sounds of piped-in mariachi music and the clatter of dishes being cleared.

“Do you know anything? Did you find anything?”

She knew he worked a late shift, so she didn’t call back with the non-answer she’d have to give. Families of the missing always hungered for any tidbit of information offered up by anyone in a position to know anything: first, by investigators, then by reporters, and lastly, if the period of time elapsed had become too long to foster hope, by a psychic. Most cops working a missing-persons case have felt the wrath of a family in search of answers.

“We’re doing all that we can,” she’d said more than once.

“All that you can? It seems like nothing! Nothing at all!”

“We can’t give you visibility for every detail of our investigation.”

That last line choked in her throat whenever she had used it. Sometimes it was more posturing than a real reflection of what was going on in the offices of the in investigative body.

Her sesame-seed bagel at the ready, Kendall went about some background research. She knew about the brush industry, of course. She’d been raised in Kitsap, a region with
NO BRUSH PICKING
signs as commonplace as
GARAGE SALE
placards. She booted up her PC and started the search for crimes on LINX, a regional criminal database. She used the key words: brush, floral industry, violence. From her open doorway, she saw Josh Anderson in the hall trying to work his vanishing charms on a pretty young temp.

He’ll never change. And he’ll never get her to go out with him
, she thought.

She clicked on a couple of hits on the subject in a law enforcement database. In Oregon, two men had been killed over a cache of cinnamon-scented mushrooms that brought an astonishingly high price in Japan’s epicurean industry. A Filipino woman in Thurston County was mutilated by a rival picker when she was caught working his territory.

He cut off both her thumbs.

“You bitch, you steal no more,” he’d said over and over as she ran holding her severed thumbs to her chest, screaming out of the woods. The man was eventually arrested and convicted and was serving ten years in Walla Walla.

A report indicated that violence had escalated along with the demand for floral greens. It seemed that more and more illegal immigrants were taking up the trade as the land, in some places, became overworked. She learned that Sheriff’s Office stats indicated that over the past two years the number of complaints made by private landowners had doubled.

The complaint made by Brett Matthews of Olalla in the very southernmost part of Kitsap County was typical of what Kendall found in the reports:

Kendall checked Mr. Matthews’ tax records to make sure he didn’t own any property in the Sunnyslope area.

He didn’t.

An article in the mainstream press also caught her eye. It had appeared in the Olympia paper two years prior. The writer presented the idea that brushpicking was one of the last vestiges of the Old West, a kind of job that pitted man and woman against the elements, literally living off the land, dodging bullets, and collecting just enough money at the end of the day to feed the family and do it all over again. They were floral rustlers. Cowboys fighting over what they felt they had a right to.

It was after eleven, and Kendall called Tulio, figuring that no matter how late he’d worked, he’d want to talk to her.

A younger man, who identified himself as Leon Pena, answered.

“One minute. Tulio! The police are on the phone!”

“Detective Stark, do you have news?” His voice was full of hesitation and hope.

Kendall locked her eyes on Celesta’s photo and spoke into the handset. “I’m afraid not.” She refrained from reminding him that they’d only had the case a day, but she knew that even an less than savvy observer who watched any TV whatsoever knew that missing-persons cases were solved in hours, not days. Days of searching usually meant someone was dead or had run away.

“Tulio, have you had any problems out there with other pickers?”

“Problems? What do you mean?”

“Did anyone threaten you or cause problems with you where you were picking?”

There was a short pause. “No. No, Detective. We did not want any trouble. We heard some Asians out there that day, but we never saw them. We never talked to them.”

“All right. I have one other question, Tulio. This is touchy, difficult….”

She could almost hear him gulp on the other end of the line. She wanted to let him down easy, if there was any possibility that Celesta Delgado had left him for another man, no matter how unlikely the scenario.

“How were you and Celesta getting along? Did you argue?”

“We were in love.”

“In love, yes,” she said, repeating his words. “But was she happy? Do you think she might have been seeing anyone?”

“No. She loved me. Only me.”

Only you,
she thought.
Of course, only you.

She told Tulio that she’d continue working the case and that if she had any more questions she’d call. As she hung up, Josh Anderson appeared in the doorway. For the first time Kendall noticed he was wearing a new suit, a gray chalk-striped outfit with a crisp blue shirt and a raspberry tie.

“How’s your day going?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “In court today or going to your homecoming dance?”

“Funny,” he said, sliding into a chair across from her. “I’ve got some important business to attend to.”

“Okay.” Kendall looked back down at her work.

“Aren’t you going to ask what it is?”

She took out a highlighter and made a yellow trail through some text on the printout. “Nope.” She could feel his agitation percolate inside his brand-new suit, and she loved it. She knew that Josh Anderson was the type of man who never missed an opportunity to tell someone—particularly a woman—how smart, how successful, and just how in demand he was. She silently counted to three.

“I’m speaking at Burien today.”

Burien was the location of the state’s police training facility.

“Really, Josh? I guess you forgot to mention it.” She glanced at the whiteboard hanging on the wall adjacent to her desk. In block letters, it read:

JOSH SPEAKING ON INVESTIGATIVE RESOURCES IN MID-SIZE JURISDICTIONS

She waited a beat. “Of course I remember. Break a leg, Josh. I want to hear all about it. I’ll work the Delgado case while you’re basking in the glow of your admirers.”

He smiled at her. She had his number. And that’s why he liked her most of the time.

Those who worked in it called it a brush shed, but Every-Greens of Washington called their processing offices next to the Old Belfair Highway a “dream factory.” The sheet-metal-sided building was the size of a mid-century high school gymnasium with faded panels depicting bouquets that celebrated the major holidays: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. Kendall parked next to a row of old cars, many mud-caked with cracked windows and backseats containing baby blankets and Wendy’s food wrappers. She figured they were the cars of the processors, mothers who worked there part-time during the week and possibly up in the woods on the weekends as pickers.

Karl Hudson was a round-faced fellow of about sixty, with heavy bags under his eyes, protruding ears, and hairy knuckles that gave him a distinctly simian appearance. He introduced himself to Kendall as the president and chief operating officer of the company that his father and mother had founded in the 1950s. Every-Greens was one of the oldest purveyors of floral greens in the state.

“You said you’re here about Celesta Delgado.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I don’t like surprises,” he said. “So I checked. Her residency status was good. She was a good picker. Always had a permit. All our pickers do.”

Kendall followed him into a large room with about twenty massive tables. Young and middle-aged women were busy sorting the raw bundles, trimming the stems of leaves that appeared bug-eaten or torn by the move from the forest to the bag.

“That’s the moneymaker,” he said, indicating a bunch of salal, its dark green, almost leathery leaves glossy with water from a quick rinse. “Lasts for months in cold storage. Can’t keep up with the demand. Bet you’ve had your share of bouquets.”

Kendall nodded. “A few.”

“When you think about it,” he said, “we
are
dream makers here. Our team creates the foundation for wedding arrangements, new baby bouquets, and, yes, even memorial wreaths. Every moment marked by flowers carries a little bit of Kitsap County.”

“Was Celesta ever a processor here?”

Karl motioned for Kendall to take a seat in his office, which she did.

“She was here for about a month, until she got the restaurant job. She was a good processor. She figured she could make more waiting tables. I didn’t stand in her way. Was glad to have her out in the woods with the Penas. Good people. Good workers.”

She knew that was the bottom line for Mr. Hudson.

“Any problems that you know of between Tulio and Celesta?”

“I wouldn’t really know. They seemed happy.” He looked down at her file.

“You seem hesitant, Mr. Hudson.”

“Look, I am concerned. We’ve had some turf wars. Demand is huge, and we’ve got people coming up from Mexico and other points south canvassing the woods for any scrap of green they can find. A few years ago, it was impossible to get pickers. Now the woods are overrun with them.”

Kendall didn’t say so, but she could feel the ugly undercurrent of racism in the way the man referred to those who worked for him—those who made him enough money to buy the Lexus she saw parked out front—as
them
.

She noticed the
CELEBRATING
50
YEARS
gold sticker that was affixed to the outgoing mail on his desk.

“A lot has changed in fifty years,” she said.

“Yes. My father-in-law started this place. He’s dead now, and a good thing—he’d go apoplectic if he had to deal with what I do these days. Between you and me, these people don’t really want to work. At least, not hard. Not like they did back in the day.”

“I see,” Kendall said, deciding she’d never buy a supermarket bouquet again.

“I pay the processors a dollar more an hour than minimum wage, and benefits to boot,” he said, glancing through his office window, which overlooked the women hovering over tables, sorting salal.

“Celesta and the Delgado brothers at least had the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that made this country great. You know, when it actually
was
great.”

When they were finished, the Every-Greens president escorted Kendall back through the work area.

A Mexican woman of no more than twenty-five handed her a single rose flanked by a fan of huckleberry.

“Celesta is a nice girl. I hope you find her,” she said.

Before Kendall could say anything, Karl Hudson shot the young woman a cold look.

“Break time isn’t for another forty-five, Carmina. Let’s get back to work, ladies.”